When a new email arrives to a group - get recipients of the e-mail

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Posted on by cvig

Good morning,

I'm working with the Office 365 Groups Mail connector.

I'm using the "When a new email arrives to a group" trigger. I'd like, then, to do actions only when the e-mail has the following conditions:

1) from a particular sender (who is not part of the group) and with attachments

2) with a particular subject ("topic" of the conversation), with a "start with" condition

3) to a specific recipient among the recipients of the e-mail (there may be many recipients).

I'm able to program the first two conditions, getting the conversation and thread post with the actions of the "When a new email arrives to a group": getting the conversation thread and getting the post.

However, I am not able to retrieve the recipients of the e-mail (usually, there are many addressees and I want to see if there is one specific that would trigger the actions) to look for the specific recipient: is it possible to get the recipients of the e-mail that's being sent to a group?

Many thanks.

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cvig 36 on at

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Well, I'm close to it.
Once I get the conversation thread, I can use "compose" to get an array of recipients from the variable "toRecipients" of the object ConversationThread.
However, it looks like it doesn't work: the compose action is empty. Can somebody help?

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eliotcole 4,363 Moderator on at

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You won't be able to use a group member in a trigger condition, I don't think, @cvig ... however, you will be able to use them as one of the Trigger conditions in the recipients, for sure. Should work with the contains() function, I reckon.

Best way to work it out is (and I'll do this now, too) to build the trigger condition as an actual expression in the flow. So get an example email, and build from that.

Easy building using the filter array (which I delete afterward):

Just tap on 'Edit in advanced mode'

There's my trigger.

Now ... like I say, that works if the email address is one of the addresses that have been sent to in the 'to' field.

If you wish to do a 'group' version of this, then you'd have to use your 2 existing triggers to whittle down the flow runs, then have the first action be to check against the group and terminate if it's not. That will at least save on action calls.

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cvig 36 on at

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Hi @eliotcole , thanks for the feedback.

What I'm trying to do is to build a group version of the e-mail one (that I have easily managed in the past with trigger conditions). I'm reading the "conversation" and trying to get the "toRecipients" variable, as you see below, however the returned variable is empty, even though, also in accordance with the documentation, it should not. That's what's very strange to me.

In other words, there's no "toRecipients" (or equivalent information) in the xml structure of the threads / conversations / posts.

(this is, for example, the post's body I can get with a "compose" action)

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cvig 36 on at

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To be even more specific, I see a discrepancy between Microsoft official documentation and what I get in the flow. May it be a bug? Or may it be due to the account plan? I'm using my business account given by my organization (Office 365 E5). Or is there some update / deployment of the platform ongoing?

This is what I get with get conversation thread (they call it "Conversation thread object"):

This is what they say I should get. But as you can see above, I don't actually get the last two variables "toRecipients" and "ccRecipients".
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/office365groupsmail/#conversationthread

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eliotcole 4,363 Moderator on at

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If this is strayed from the trigger conditions, then I would take a stab at the logic, here.

Why not just retrieve the message id of one of (or all of) the email(s) and then call the email(s) and take the value from there to check the group and hence the membership there-in?

If (as my brackets inter) you wished to do this for all the emails, you could just build an array from each email in a conversation and check all groups included for the given ID.

This seems like a sound approach.

To speak purely abstractly about conversations ... and purely unrelated to what's going on here ... I wonder if, for conversation details, that address fields could be changeable over each email (or would that infer a separate conversation, I dunno) as people bring others into the chain. This might be a reason why that particular information is just an empty field, or why in some cases the value is empty since others were added to the chain, and thus it was wiped.

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cvig 36 on at

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@eliotcole, fine, but the groups have a different logic with respect to e-mails, as said in the documentation. There's no "e-mail"; indeed there are conversations, threads, posts, even though indeed groups do receive "e-mails". So I think speculating too much about what you say doesn't lead to a conclusion.

In any case, there's a bug in the connector "Get a conversation thread" (which shall provide the "ConversationThread" object: https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/I-Found-A-Bug/Office-365-Groups-Mail-connector/td-p/862078
It doesn't retrieve the toRecipients and ccRecipients properties, except than with a GET HTTP call (which I tested and seems working).

Regards.

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eliotcole 4,363 Moderator on at

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Except that if you can get the details of a group, then you can look up the group ... and if you can look up the group, you can see the members of a group.

... and if you can retrieve the members of a group, you can retrieve the emails of the members of the group.

But if the HTTP call does it, then it's all good. 👍

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cvig 36 on at

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Thanks, however my request is not to retrieve the e-mails of the members of the group.
As I've said, I want to retrieve the recipients of an e-mail sent to a group.

Say that john doe sends an e-mail to OFFICE365GROUP@domain.com and to daffyduck@disney.com. So, daffyduck@disney.com is among the addressees / recipients of the e-mail.
I can access the e-mail because I am a member of the group (but daffyduck@disney.com and john doe are not; however, this is not an issue), that indeed in a group becomes a "post" or "conversation"; I actually want to get "duffyduck@disney.com" with a flow. This can't be done due to a bug of the connector. That's the story.

Regards.

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kellerjar 4 on at

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Hello,
did you solve the problem with getting the address from ccRecipients?

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cvig 36 on at

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Hello,
I haven't solved the problem yet. At the time of the above posts I've even tried with my company's IT support using the HTTP requests, but we've found the same issue: those two arguments were not passed by the engine, so we couldn't retrieve them in any way.

Honestly, I haven't tested the above routines more recently to discover if, in case, Microsoft has done some debugging and updating... did you?

Best regards!

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